Big Ideas Are Easy - Making It Happen Is the Hard Part

The NY Times article “Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work” is excellent.

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.

Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

I have seen a lot of would-be entrepreneurs who think that the idea has the value. Bad news: it’s the hard work you put into the idea, it’s the implementation, that has the value. Anybody can have a great idea; most never get taken to the level of a great product.